International studio (40.1910)

Etchings of Herman A. IVebster

the cathedral by herman a. webster

their splendid artistry, the more haphazard methods
of the Rue Brise Miche and Les Blanchissenses
touch a far deeper note of sympathy. They have
in them the breezy, natural oratory that is often so
much more stirring than the fluent, polished
periods of the accomplished speaker. But even
where Mr. Webster is most precise in his articula-
tion, most resolute in his adherence to familiar
truths, he always combines with this a personal
aspect and a power of selection that, disregarding
the commonplace and petty, lend poetry to the
interpretation.

In studying the work of a young etcher—and
Mr. Webster is still young as an etcher—it is al-
most always possible to trace certain influences
which, quite legitimately, have acted upon his
choice of subject and his technique. In one of his

first etchings, The Court, Bonrron, the Whistler in-
fluence is frankly apparent. Les Blanchisseuses is
in no sense an imitative plate, but I should have
said it was the work of a man who knew Whistler's
Unsafe Tenement by heart. And there comes in
the critic's danger of leaping to rash conclusions,
for Mr. Webster tells me he never saw that print
by Whistler till long after his etching was made.
For the Meryon influence, which is clearly ap-
parent in much of his work, Mr. Webster makes no
apology. "I have done my best to simply learn
from him not to steal"—that is his own expressive
way of putting it.

Mr. Webster has not learned from others at the
cost of his own individuality, and one reason for
the freshness that characterizes his work is that he
is one of those who like to transfer their first im-
pressions of nature direct to the plate in the open
air. With very few exceptions that is how his
etchings have been made. Another chief excellence
in his work lies in the fact that from the first he
has been his own printer. Here he has no need of
any artifice; there is no trace in his etchings of the
meretricious printing which Whistler condemned
as "treacly." Light and shade enter into charm-
ing alliance in his prints, but line is always of the
confederacy, and it is to purity of line that the
shadows which tell so strongly owe their strength.
In the very depths of them there is always a lumi-
nous gloom, never a trace of the harshness and
opacity that come from slurred workmanship and
reliance upon printers' ink.

Perhaps I have said too much already, for Mr.
Webster's work is well able to speak for itself.
But there is one noteworthy feature, common to all
his plates, that claims attention, and that is his
power of rendering sunlight. If he loves dark and
dingy thoroughfares with dilapidated roofs and
moldering plaster it is for the sake of those quaint
shadows that peep from their recesses and climb
the high walls, and still more for the patches of
brilliant, quivering sunlight to which the shadows
give so full a value. He seems to hear, like Corot,
the actual crash of the sun upon the wall—I'eclat
du soleil qui jrappe. M. H.

The eighty-fifth annual exhibition of the Na-
tional Academy of Design will open in the galleries
of the American Fine Arts Society March 12, clos-
ing April 17. Varnishing day is set for March n,
from 9 a. m. to 12 noon. The hanging committee
will be H. Bolton Jones, John W. Alexander and
Isidore Konti.

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